Unsettled
SOPHIE LEE-JENKINS
Pasts accrue like debt in ceilings, collapse
under my crowbar and erupt (2014) in a cloud
of brick and coal dust. We don’t fear the dirt; renovation
is in the family. Dad’s first house (1983) sent
threads of lead and chimney ash lacing into
blooded sand blowing over Gadigal (2009);
the cleared land collecting, collating and decamping
like ashes (2020) of the eastern forests, choking a black sky;
like a puff of buildings splintering (2024) over Deir Al-Balah;
like wood, brick, glass, steel billowing out at 442.5696 m/s:
a soft breeze of blast overpressure.
I started work in the footings: corroded stone piers,
ringbarked by mud wasps. Little mouths, eating;
perhaps they stung my antecedent here. He who strapped (1826)
his cabin to timber piles cut from red cedar stands;
framed it with Oregon from Siuslaw lands
carried in ships cut from Kauri in Ngāti Rongoū whenua;
stomped his heels on Blackbutt floors and cursed: this is Mine.
We still ship Oregon, but the Koolai is gone -
a weeping embroidered woman clings to her last olive tree
and the Kauri is dying back; never mind.
You don’t need roots if you lay hard foundations.
The bowed grey-green boards of my father’s cottage (1991) made a
cheap paean to the ghosts of gumtrees. Painted flannel flowers
danced across the ceiling, frozen on the cusp of winter over
subterranean (1853) cracked China cups for India tea;
bicycle tubes of Congo rubber; broken bricks of buried memory.
Dad hung Lycett’s sketch of its first days in the flower room; white colonial
cabins in pasture and tall pickets. Still, silent birth on razed corroboree.
We possess the earth with a bulldozer’s caress -
blood and song swept away with white paint and a new name:
(for the land) Awabakal Country Newcastle
(for me) O’Haloran Hallinan.
Cut up the Songlines and forget our old shanties -
the old country in me is dead and fragmented:
(New) Wales; (New) York; (New) England.
Tabula Rasa people on Terra Nullius land.
I married under the ranges of Baiame’s feet in Darkinjung Country
sheathed in wattle and sugarbush. From my mouth
dripped vows of belonging, but his stone eyes bore witness:
‘I am was always will be
(time immemorial)
my Country.’
The celebrant, smiling, said: *citations needed.
I turned my forbear’s rings on my finger; gifted
Bohemian garnets and Boer diamond chips from an old soldier.
Men with Irish blood and Scottish names; game pieces thrown across oceans,
squatting in Scone and killing for Empire in Palestine. Cities they smashed (1917)
were wrecked again (1948); now armies return to mow them down (2024).
Grass grows long on old soldiers’ graves, its tender carers missing, uncounted,
and happy families with draftsmans’ plans clamour at the gates.
(We don’t hear the voices under the rubble.)
Dad chose reckless death in the ironbarks and left the house empty,
but for cold porridge and a broken chair. He wept last words
to cicadas and sword grass, lay and softly rotted at Baiame’s feet,
like dropped fruit. After the funeral fires I threw his charred shards to the wind;
never to reconcile with earth. Flotsam of empire.
We, settlers: house-flippers of nations. I know
the shape, now, of a boy flattened by a tank, and
the scream of a girl watching her father burn and
the empty arms of a mother enfolding the smallest shroud. I wake
in the rusting bushfire dawn and I think, yes, of Palestine and I think
of the man who cut down that stand of eucalypts,
built his hut and watched as it crumbled; as the
log piers festered, and the termites ate them.
How he raged and spat as the deadwood
decayed everywhere it chafed at the
living earth. Stormed over to the
stump of severed gum and saw
the green shoots it sprouted;
reviled its resilience;
its resistance; and
kicked it.
Sophie Lee-Jenkins is an erstwhile chef still cooking, studying, writing and raising a small person on Ngāi Tahu land. She writes poetry and short fiction and aims to complete a novel and perfect her breadmaking one day. Unsettled was shortlisted for the Future Leaders Prize.
